Before we make this plugin part of DEVONthink Pro Office we’d like to gather some more experience with your scanner or camera and listen to what you think about it. Yes, we don’t have all models available for testing in our labs. No kidding.

So if you are a DEVONthink Pro Office user and own a scanner other than a Fujitsu ScanSnap (we support this using a different technique), a digital camera, iPhone, iPod, or iPad with a camera please download the DEVONthink Scanner Plugin Beta here and give it a test drive. The accompanying Readme file explains how to install it, use it, and how to report issues and send feedback.

Templates können einfache Dateien sein, die dann direkt als Vorlage benutzt werden. DEVONthink unterstützt aber auch komplexere Templates, die Skripte enthalten können und auch mehrere Sprachvarianten. Diese Templates werden in AppleScript packages verpackt. Nach aussen stellen sie sich wie einfache Dateien dar.

If you read German make sure to have a look. Click here.

GigaOm blogger Nancy Nally about the book:

The authors of “SEND” aren’t etiquette mavens laying down arbitrary rules. Instead, what they’ve created — after years of heavy professional email usage — is actually a guide to improving the quality of communications via email. … If you live (and work) by your inbox, “SEND” is a must-read for improving the quality of your email communication and avoiding costly missteps.

Click here to visit the book authors’ website.

But the advantage of a book like “The Most Human Human” is that even when it’s wrong, it does make you think. Reading it, I constantly found my mind pinging off of whatever Christian was discussing and into flights of exploratory speculation about the amount of information encoded in the seemingly routine exchanges of small talk or the reasons why it’s much harder to tell a false story in reverse chronological order. It’s an unusual book whose primary gift lies in distracting you from itself. I’d like to see the computers come up with something like that.

Click here to read more from Laura Miller about this unusual book.

Yours Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann & the DEVONtechnologies team

PS: Our office will be closed from December 23, 2011, to January 8, 2012. Support will be available by email but we might reply slower than usual.

Learn more about how you can use Keyboard Maestro for automating things in DEVONthink in our user forum.

[…] It is excellent. I never give feedback to anybody unless I am really, really extremely frustrated and dissatisfied with something (by definition a grumpy old git). So this email is a bit of a departure. Well done on developing such a marvellous, easy to use and useful piece of software. Wish I had shares in it. If you have any doubters send them over to me, I’d be delighted to explain how much it has helped me. I mean it, send them over.

Thank you, Tony, for your email!

No wonder I am pleased to notice that Pair Networks, the data center that runs e.g. the DEVONtechnologies website, is building a brand new data center with the goal of creating the world’s greenest hosting facility. Thumbs up!

One often-overlooked tool for doing deep research is DEVONagent. It allows you to really dig into a topic and find citations that might take much longer with a straight Google search. DEVONagent Express is equally useful, especially in blogging situations.

Click here to read more about how Brett collects data for his blog posts.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) proposes DEVONthink as one of the best Mac productivity apps 2011. Now help us and nominate DEVONthink, visit TUAW and leave a comment!

This is a world-wide offer and so starts on November 24, 2011, at 6 p.m. CET so that you can take advantage of it regardless if you live in New Zealand or on Hawaii. The offer will close on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, at 9 a.m. CET.

Like it has been a tradition in the USA for many, many years, we give you an exclusive discount of 25 percent on all our software products, only from Black Friday through Cyber Monday weekend (Nov 25 through Nov 28), as well as on all upgrades and apps in the Mac and iOS App Store (as soon as Apple has released the price change). So if you are playing with the idea to buy a license or an upgrade, for you, your spouse, your kids, or your friends, this weekend is the right time! Click here for more information.

This is a world-wide offer and so starts on November 24, 2011, at 6 p.m. CET so that you can take advantage of it regardless if you live in New Zealand or on Hawaii. The offer will close on Tuesday, November 29, 2011, at 9 a.m. CET.

Install it from DEVONthink’s or DEVONnote’s Support Assistant (open it from the Help menu and follow the link at the bottom to the extras page). Thank you, Nicolae!

Infotention is a word I came up with to describe a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills and computer-powered information filters. The inside and outside of infotention work best together with a third element ‹ sociality.

Howard talks about how he receives information and applies hard-carved filters so that in the end he only has to read and watch the most relevant data.

I already quoted him in my diploma thesis on virtual reality and I also strongly suggest everyone interested in the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media to keep an eye on his publications. Click here to watch his “Mini course on infotention”.

DEVONthink — Das Arbeitsbuch is available for US $ 12.50 in our online shop (see the DEVONthink section) as well as for €8.99 on the author’s homepage.

The ScanSnap is addictive, and I’ve hardly begun to learn how to use it. Here’s how cool it is: My son comes home from the first day of school with a fistful of forms and handouts. I open the scanner, stick them in, choose an option from the ScanSnap icon in the Dock, and push the big blue button on the scanner. Within moments (or minutes if I chose to run OCR) the entire pile is onscreen, even the double-sided forms and the pages that emerge from the backpack slightly crumpled.

While Tonya herself is not using DEVONthink Pro Office, she mentions it among the available options if you want to go paperless and points to Joe Kissell’s really cool Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink 2 and Take Control of Your Paperless Office ebooks, both also available in our own online shop.

- MyThoughts
- MindNode Pro
- NovaMind Pro
- Mindcad Incubator
- Inspiration

Some of these apps come either with a Quick Look plugin that allows DEVONthink to preview them when you add them to your database or at least write PDFs that you can add to your project files in DEVONthink.

There has also been a discussion on our user forum that might be interesting for you in case you’re interested in using a mind mapping app with DEVONthink. Click here.

Place the caret in any cell to change also the alignment, its border, and its background. Use Tab and Shift-Tab to move from cell to cell. If you have closed the Table panel and want to bring it back, place the caret in any cell, then choose Format > Table again.

Thank you, Andreas, for this cool template!

Last week I told you about DEVONnote for free in Mac & i magazine but if you are not living in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland you are out of luck. — Do not despair, here’s your next chance: DEVONthink Pro is available as part of the MacLegion 2011 Fall Bundle for US $49.99. The other apps are pretty cool, too.

However, if you exactly know where the data should go this can be an unnecessary step. Change the default destination in the app’s preferences, Import tab, to “Select group”. Now whenever DEVONthink or DEVONnote receive data the group selector panel pops up and lets you choose a destination (database and) group right away.

For four years, over the course of my PhD, I mucked about with it: exploring, optimizing, and adding to it–sometimes systematically, sometimes not. In consequence, it’s a gnarled, twisty and flawed little place (presumably, like the brain whence it sprung).

Nevertheless, I thought I’d offer a tour through my PhD database for several purposes: to allow those who are interested in finding out more about DT to get some specific insight into its uses for humanities research; to document for myself some of the things I did which worked and didn’t; to hear from anyone with more experience in research management systems; and perhaps offer something new or different to those who already use DT or something similar.

Click here to read part one of her three-part series on “DevonThink and history research” and don’t miss to read part 2 and part 3, too.

Add as To Do to OmniFocus.scptd

Explanation: AppleScript scripts call apps usually by their “bundle ID”, an internal identifier unique to every app. Unfortunately the OmniGroup chose a new bundle ID for OmniFocus on the Mac App Store which breaks the script. The new script calls OmniFocus simply by its name now.

Unpack the .zip archive and replace your copy of the script in “~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink Pro 2/Scripts/Reminders” with the new one. If you’re using OS X 10.7 Lion and you don’t see the ~/Library folder use Go > Go to Folder in the Finder an enter “~/Library” to jump directly into the invisible folder.

In short, at the moment I am highly satisfied by DEVONthink’s ability to handle my data, to collect my files and to support me in my creative work. […] Currently my view of DEVONthink is like the Enterprise in “Star Trek XI” diving up from the gas clouds of Titan. It doesn’t look like there is much, but there’s something powerful — and it blows you away.

Thank you, Daniel! Click here to read his full review in his blog, Organizing Creativity.

If you want to take part in the current financial market hysteria PhotoStickies can be of help: Find a good live ticket image you want to keep an eye on and open it as an image sticky in PhotoStickies. Now use some of the filters to make it transparent and move it to the background layer. Voilà. No more reason for staying calm just because you “don’t know”.

Last Fall, with the impending arrival of our first child and initial plans to sell our house, I decided to simplify our life by reducing the amount of stuff we kept around. Part of this was my Great Paperless Office Initiative 2010 (affectionately referred to as “sigh” by my wife). […] My tools are: DEVONthink Pro Office because of its ability to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scanned documents and the Fujitsu ScanSnap S1300 scanner. Together I can almost effortlessly scan, OCR, and organize my documents. The result is a paperless, searchable and smart filing system.

Read more about how Ryan set-up looks like in his blog, Happy Cog.

If you work with Markdown in DEVONthink Brett Terpstra’s app Marked (available on the Mac App Store) make it even better: It allows to edit Markdown-styled text with a live preview. With Marked installed right-click a Markdown-formatted document and choose Marked from the Open With sub-menu.

1. Type Shift-Command-Delete.
2. Pause for 0.25 seconds.
3. Press the OK button.
4. Execute some AppleScript code to empty the Finder’s trash.
5. Post a Growl notification.

If you like the idea of automating things, you should have a look at Keyboard Maestro.

July 13, 9:06 a.m.: Caller on Greenbriar Lane reports she heard gunshots then people walking, now sounds like construction of some type, but she is afraid to leave residence to check. 9:29 a.m. Caller advising disregard officer. Not a gunshot; a squirrel got into a transformer and exploded.

And I thought only squibs would explode.

DEVONthink Pro Office 2.2
DEVONthink Pro 2.2
DEVONthink Personal 2.2
DEVONnote 2.2
DEVONagent Pro 3.0
DEVONagent Express 3.0.3
DEVONagent Lite 3.0.3

EasyFind 4.7.2
PhotoStickies 5.6.3
XMenu 1.9.3

CalcService 3.4
WordService 2.8

Note: DEVONagent Lite is not yet available in the Mac App Store. It first has to pass Apple’s review, of course.

Important note: DEVONagent Pro 3.0 is a paid upgrade. So if you own a DEVONagent v1 or v2 license purchased before Jan 1, 2009, you’ll need to buy an upgrade to use it. If you’re eligible for a free upgrade you should have received your new license code already. Version 2.3.1 is, of course, still available in our legacy downloads.

The sync technology allow you to synchronize all your databases directly between Macs on the local network as well as over-the-air using e.g. Dropbox, WebDAV, your own AFP file servers, as well as — later — iCloud. As soon as the beta team testing is over and all is working as expected we will add the new technology also to DEVONthink To Go replacing the current sync code completely.

As said, we’re in internal alpha phase now, so please stay tuned just a little longer. If you have a complex setup that could be valuable for the extensive testing we’re now doing, please email me to become part of the beta team (don’t forget your user forum name).

But why manually? DEVONthink Pro (Office) comes with scripts for iCal and all major task managers that add references to your task list or GTD inbox including reminders. You can find the scripts in Scripts > Reminders.